The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine is a world-leading centre for research and postgraduate education in public and global health, with 3,900 students and more than 1,000 staff worki ng in over 100 countries. The School is one of the highest-rated research institutions in the UK, and was recently cited as the world's leading research-focused graduate school. Our mission is to improve health and health equity in the UK and worldwide; working in partnership to achieve excellence in public and global health research, education and translation of knowledge into policy and practice.

The School's Library has a comprehensive specialist collection of over 75,000 printed and electronic items in the fields of public and global health. This includes an excellent collection of rare books and pamphlets, containing many seminal texts from the Victorian era of sanitation reform and tropical medicine. Our collection of items on smallpox and vaccination was collected by Dr Richard Reece and was described by the British Medical Journal as '...the most complete library in this country of the old literature of small-pox, variolation and vaccination'.